Government as a PlatformUpdates and news on the Government as a Platform work2018-08-31T12:07:25Zhttps://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/feed/Ashley Stephenshttps://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/?p=45782018-08-31T12:07:25Z2018-08-31T10:30:09Z

Since our last update, the adoption of GaaP products has accelerated. We are now supporting more than 400 services from 120 organisations across the public sector.

GOV.UK Registers has created registers with more than a dozen departments, GOV.UK Notify has sent more than 150 million messages, and the number of services now using GOV.UK Pay has grown by almost a quarter.

There's more detail below on how we’ve been iterating and improving our products that have led to these achievements.

This is an important part of the support GDS will now offer local authorities through the Local Digital Declaration, which was announced yesterday.

How Notify and Pay can help local authorities

Local authorities provide a huge range of services to their users. Many of these services involve sending messages or taking payments.

GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay provide a quick, easy and cheap way for service teams to do this. They can be easily integrated into existing services, or used without any systems integration. GOV.UK Notify can already be used without procurement and, later this year, GOV.UK Pay will be too.

Following months of user research and trials with a number of service teams in local authorities, we’re confident that GOV.UK Notify and Pay are now ready for the same widespread use in local government.

What we learned from working with local government

We’ve always thought that GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay could be just as useful for local authorities as they are for central government departments. But we wanted to see if local authorities had any different needs because they do operate in a different context.

The main finding from the trials was validation that the same common needs that exist in central government exist in local government too.

In fact, the only significant enhancement that we added to the platforms as a result of these trials, was enhanced branding options. We needed to better support the diverse range of brands that exist in local government to make sure a user’s experience is consistent throughout their entire journey.

How you can use it

If you’re from a local authority, visit GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay, where you can find more details about what our platforms offer – and create a trial account to have a play.

The products are being used more widely than ever, by a diverse range of service teams. And we're excited to say there are many more in our pipeline.

We’ve continued to iterate and improve our platforms based on our user’s feedback and research. This means the people designing and running services can spend more time focusing on what’s unique to their service.

Below is more detail about the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes, some of which will be showcased at Sprint 18 by teams across government.

Sprint 18 will be taking place in May. If you want to hear how Government as a Platform could help your service, our team - and others that use our products from across government - will be at Sprint 18 to answer your questions.

The health sector is starting to use GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK PaaS. Arms length bodies and NHS hospitals and trusts are among the early adopters. In this post we look at the benefits our products are bringing to the health sector.

GOV.UK Pay is now available for NHS service teams to use

GOV.UK Pay lets any government service take payments quickly and easily from their users. It’s been designed to meet the needs of public sector service teams, and offers:

Hosting for health services with GOV.UK Platform as a Service

GOV.UK Platform as a Service (GOV.UK PaaS) is a hosting platform that makes it easier and faster for development teams to build, deploy, manage and scale applications in the cloud. It offers service teams:

resilient and secure web hosting with 99.99% uptime in the last 6 months

24/7 support for teams using the hosting

the ability to focus on building applications rather than supporting infrastructure

Department for International Trade, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Cabinet Office all use the GOV.UK PaaS.

GOV.UK PaaS would be useful for health organisations who:

are building new, cloud-native services

have a low budget, limited technical resources or webops capability

want to move quickly to develop new services, for example, to prepare for EU exit

]]>Egle Uzkuraitytehttps://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/?p=16012018-03-15T11:09:38Z2018-03-15T11:03:52ZLast year we announced both GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay would run pilots with local authorities.

We wanted to understand how the needs of local authorities differed from central government, and how Government as a Platform could help them with digital transformation.

We've always had strong interest from local government - over 30 councils expressed an interest in GOV.UK Notify and 15 councils in GOV.UK Pay. We had limited spaces, so on a first-come-first-serve basis, GOV.UK Notify piloted with 20 services and GOV.UK Pay with 5 councils.

We’ve been inspired by the innovative ways in which councils are using our products - below are some examples, and we'll hear from the people using our products who explain how they meet the needs of their users.

Piloting with GOV.UK Pay

Till Wirth, Product Manager, GOV.UK Pay

Councils play an important part in users interactions with government: from schools and parks to care services and council tax collection. It’s been interesting finding out how councils use GOV.UK Pay. Here are some examples:

Kent County Council resolves disputes between consumers and traders faster by using GOV.UK Pay

London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Council uses GOV.UK Pay to take payments for its ‘dropped kerb’ service

Stratford-on-Avon District Council uses GOV.UK Pay to make it easier for users pay for the collection of bulky waste items

Canterbury City Council uses GOV.UK Pay to speed up the payment process for people running events at council venues and sites

Jason Lorenz, Business Development Manager at Stratford-on-Avon District Council

“Our focus is on the overall solution cost, Payment Card Industry compliance and customer trust. We also need a partner who provides a secure technical framework and one that is straightforward enough to hook into our existing services. For us GOV.UK Pay ticks all these boxes.”

Peter Davies, Head of Digital Transformation and Policy, Canterbury City Council

"In Canterbury we're building all of our services around the needs of our customers. Because of this, we know we need a payment option that can change when user needs change, is easy to use, and is accessible to everyone.

We're collaborating with GDS on GOV.UK Pay because we think it meets these needs, and we know the team works to the same user-focused principles."

We’re learning too

We’re working with councils to support them, but also to learn and innovate together. We recently invited some councils in to hear about their transformation projects, here's what they said.

Piloting with GOV.UK Notify

Pete Herlihy, Product Manager, GOV.UK Notify

Since we first announced our pilots with local government in June 2017, we’ve seen a number of councils use GOV.UK Notify in a variety of ways.

We learnt a lot from the pilots and we’ll continue to develop the product to meet the needs of local authorities. For instance, both GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay offer custom branding so that the user’s experience is consistent with the organisation they are interacting with, and councils can keep their brand identity.

We’re excited to see councils use GOV.UK Notify across a wide range of services and that it’s becoming their default messaging solution. Our very first beta partner, Pembrokeshire County Council, is already using GOV.UK Notify for five of their services.

Gareth Johnson, Web Manager, Pembrokeshire County Council

"We were delighted to be the first local authority to become a beta partner for GOV.UK Notify. By using GOV.UK Notify we could quickly expand our digital communications to include SMS messaging.

GOV.UK Notify has enabled us to quickly scale our digital offering and provide alternative ways for us to engage and communicate with customers using a cost-effective platform.

The initial and ongoing support we received from GOV.UK Notify has been outstanding. We selected the following council services to trial:

closure alerts (school closures during bad weather, bridge closures)

Council Tax e-billing notifications

taxi licensing permit renewals

missed payments, failed direct debits, payment reminders

notification of low balances on cashless catering accounts"

Graham Hutchings, Senior IT Developer, Pembrokeshire County Council

"Gaining access to GOV.UK .NET Notify client was made easy through NuGet, and the API’s were well documented and easy to implement.

We used the .NET client but we could have used any of the six available clients for the corresponding development platforms. This makes it highly accessible and will enable us to offer further API integration options across an array of different services in the future."

GOV.UK Notify is helping councils in the run-up to local elections

The Register to Vote service uses GOV.UK Notify to keep stakeholders, such as local authorities, informed about their services. Planned downtime and other operational information is sent quickly to those who need to know.

With local elections due in May 2018, local authorities can use GOV.UK Notify in a range of ways, including:

Lisa Keenaghan is the Digital Service Manager at the Disclosure and Barring Service. Her role puts her at the forefront of digital transformation. In this post she talks about how using the whole Government as a Platform (GaaP) product suite has helped transform a DBS service.

DBS helps employers make safer recruitment decisions and prevent unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups, including children.

One of the services we offer is a ‘basic check’. This is a criminal background check that shows any unspent convictions. You can request a check for yourself, or you may be asked to provide it by your employer. These checks are used by millions of people, businesses and organisations across the country for a variety of purposes. A basic check from DBS costs £25.

Previously, when people asked for basic checks, they could apply online or through the post and would have to upload or copy documents, which contained sensitive material about their identity.

We wanted to transform the service to meet both the user needs and the digital transformation agenda. To do this, we used the full suite of GaaP products, as well as the range of guidance and standards that GDS supports.

Moving the service online, quickly and cheaply

Our goal was to provide a service that could be run entirely online, from initial applications, through to payment and identity verification. We wanted to make the application for a basic check as convenient as we could.

Previously if we wanted to transform a service in this way, we would either need to source elements from private suppliers or build them ourselves. Both of these options could prove costly.

Starting with the Service Toolkit

Our starting point was the GDS Service Toolkit. This features all the tools, products and guidance we were looking for.

And the Service Manual helped us think and plan in depth about how we would transform the service to meet user needs, from initial design through to service assessment.

We've benefitted from advice and guidance which has been extensively user researched across government for example, the standard template design.

Using multiple GaaP products

We’re using a number of GaaP products in the new basic check service.

We’re using GOV.UK Pay to take payments. This component has integrated seamlessly into our user journey, providing a high level of security and an easy process for users.

By integrating with GOV.UK Pay, we know we’re using a product that is continually iterated and developed based on the feedback of service teams like ours. Users sending their £25 processing fee will be reassured by a government payment platform.

With GOV.UK Notify, we can update users quickly on the submission of their application form, so they are better informed and less likely to feel the need to contact the call centre. And we can switch templates quickly and easily, so based on user feedback we can change the messages we send at the touch of a button.

Using GOV.UK Verify means that, for the first time, people applying for a basic check no longer need to send anything in the post and can do the process entirely online. Being able to verify their identity online, saves our users time and means we can start processing their application quicker. User feedback has shown us that ‘speed of completion’ is by far the number one demand from our users.

People who are unable to verify online can apply through the Post Office Counters Government Contract. This shows we are using existing frameworks and contracts to deliver efficiency and meet user needs.

Next up - making the service even better

We have several discoveries underway to explore how we can make the basic check application process even easier, such as allowing businesses to pay on account rather than for each individual check.

We’ll continue to refine our service, and we’re excited about how we might do that in the future. Products such as GOV.UK Platform as a Service offers us a hosting platform. We’ll explore the possibility of integrating with this as we develop our service and as the platform matures.

But we’ve made huge progress in a short space of time - thanks in part to GaaP products. A basic criminal record check can now be done entirely online and that’s something we’re proud of.

Get in touch

You can visit our service toolkit to see what the products are like and how they can help you run your service. You can sign up for test accounts to try the products out.

It’s been almost 3 years since the Government Digital Service launched Government as a Platform (GaaP). In our #GovPlatforms week we're looking at how GaaP products are supporting transformation across government.

GaaP products are used by more than 200 services across government and are the default choice for a growing number of departments and agencies. The products free up teams to look at what is unique to their service and help departments transform the way they work.

GaaP products are also transforming the way people interact with services. In this post we talk to 2 service teams about how GaaP products have made things better for their users.

How GOV.UK Notify is helping military veterans claim benefits

I’m Chris Pinder and I’m the Welfare Business Manager at the Veterans Welfare Service. We’re part of the Ministry of Defence and we offer support to armed forces veterans, to help them with housing, benefits and pensions.

For many veterans, it’s not always immediately clear what help is available to them, or how their veteran status affects the benefits they're offered. That’s where we come in.

One of the things we do is provide home visits for users. These are very popular - and for good reason. Speaking to someone face-to-face, particularly about sensitive or personal information, can make the process more accommodating and comfortable.

However, one challenge we faced when offering home visits, was having our caseworkers turn up for appointments which users had forgotten about. Caseworkers would arrive at a veteran's home to find no one was home, or they were in the bath, or generally just unprepared. This was forcing users to reschedule their appointments and was wasting our staff 's time.

Previously, we would phone in advance of appointments as a reminder. We make around 7,000 visits each year, so we'd also have to make 7,000 calls too. This was taking up 4 to 5 hours of staff-time each day. We knew we needed to do something about this, but we had a limited budget. That’s when we discovered GOV.UK Notify.

Providing a better service

We found GOV.UK Notify on the GDS Service Toolkit, which is a page that features everything you need to design, build and run services that meet government standards.

We now use GOV.UK Notify to send appointment reminders to our users, rather than phoning them up. This means we spend 4 to 5 minutes, rather than 4 to 5 hours, sending appointment reminders. And users receive a timely text - although we still catch people in the bath from time to time.

The extra time we gain every day allows us to offer a better service to users, with more time helping them and less time chasing them for appointments.

Faster and cheaper

Because GOV.UK Notify was designed for government by government, it plugged into our service seamlessly. We were up and running in a matter of days, whereas with many third-party solutions, integration can take weeks or months.

GOV.UK Notify also offers a lot of flexibility. For example, it lets us change the message template we send users instantly. It also allows us to send a message to a few, or thousands of users, at the touch of a button.

How GOV.UK Pay is helping people make big life decisions

I’m Kaz Hufton and I’m the Product Manager for the Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) online service at the Office of the Public Guardian. LPA is a service that lets people appoint one or more people (known as ‘attorneys’) to help them make decisions, or to make decisions on their behalf. It’s a service for people who’ve suffered an accident or have an illness and are unable to make their own financial, health or welfare decisions. It means they can nominate someone they trust to make these decisions for them.

Our service helps vulnerable people around the country get the help they need with big life decisions. This means that even small improvements to the service can make a big difference to our users.

Better suited to user needs

There’s a small payment involved in the application process for an LPA. This feature used to be provided by a third-party supplier. When we looked at what GOV.UK Pay could offer instead, it was clear that it was better suited to our users’ needs.

We know that many users are cautious about payments, so having a GOV.UK-branded payment page means we can reassure users they’re in the right place.

Safe and secure

GOV.UK Pay has the highest level of security accreditation by the Payment Card Industry (PCI), so when people are making important life decisions such as using LPA, they can rely on a secure payment process with an interface they can trust.

As a team, we’re excited about the future of GOV.UK Pay. We know the people in the team developing the product are open to our feedback, they're continually iterating and adding new functionality. So as new payment options appear, we know GOV.UK Pay will be flexible enough to make sure we continue to meet user needs as they evolve over time.

Although Government as a Platform (GaaP) has no official birthday, the 29 March holds a special significance. On that day in 2015, it was announced that GaaP would be part of the ‘next phase of digital transformation’.

We’ve increased the number of registers available for public use to 34, with a further 36 in progress. The Registers team has also completed the first iteration of the Register Management Tool, which is being used internally to create and update registers.

This week we’ll share some of the ways in which services - from central government departments such as the Disclosure and Barring Service to local authorities such as Pembrokeshire County Council - are making use of Government as a Platform.

If you’re using one of our components and have your own transformation story, tell us about it on Twitter this week using the #GovPlatforms hashtag.

We’ve matured operationally

Our platforms are not only being used more widely than ever, they’re also better platforms than ever. We’ve scaled up our operational support, as well as increasing the range of functionality offered by the platforms.

GOV.UK Email have switched their email notification system to use the GOV.UK Notify platform. This means GOV.UK Notify will process an extra 500 million messages every year. GOV.UK Notify sent between 5,000 to 42,000 emails a day in the last 60 days of 2017. So we’re proud that even with this substantial increase in volume, our response rates still remain high.

GOV.UK PaaS has zero downtime on deployments, meaning there's no downtime to live services, or the platform, when we do platform deployments. We’ve improved our API downtime from up to 40 seconds, which could be frustrating for services using GOV.UK PaaS, down to around 1 second.

GOV.UK Pay is fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) meaning services can be assured that the platform is compliant with the highest security standards.

These services were designed, developed and delivered very quickly, thanks to Government as a Platform’s common components."

#GovPlatforms

We’ll be blogging every day this week to look at the various ways our common platforms are helping services meet the needs of users. We’ll hear from smaller departments without large back-end IT teams, larger departments undergoing significant transformation projects, local authorities and health authorities.

We recently announced that Sprint 18 will be taking place in May. If you want to hear directly from the team about how Government as a Platform could help your service, DIT and other departments will be at Sprint 18 in May along with our team to answer your questions.

A couple of years ago, building on the success of GOV.UK, we launched a range of cost-effective components that support common needs when building digital services. We called this approach Government as a Platform (GaaP).

As announced by Caroline Nokes earlier today in her speech to the Institute for Government on the future of digital government, over 100 services across 26 departments and agencies are now using GaaP tools, guidance and components. From GOV.UK Verify to GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Platform as a Service, Government as a Platform is becoming a reality, and that’s a great thing for taxpayers and citizens.

Why Government as a Platform?

Government departments and agencies should not have to reinvent the wheel each time they’re building a digital service. We don’t want them to spend time and money solving problems others have already tackled elsewhere in government.

Instead, they should be able to spend their time, effort and resources on adding value to the services they run for citizens, rather than just keeping them ticking over.

They should be able to benefit from the economies of scale that government can offer, and make the most of what is on the market while avoiding supplier lock-in.

We set out to build and run the common functionalities that services share on behalf of government. GOV.UK showed us that common platforms can work for government by bringing together thousands of webpages in one place, and picked up a few accolades on the way for its innovative and intuitive design.

What have we done since 2015?

We’ve built four platforms to complement GOV.UK. These are: Verify, Notify, Pay and PaaS. We’ve taken the time to make these easy to use, so even the smallest agency can benefit from them. And, we’ve built them in a way that encourages departments and agencies to choose them over alternatives.

As soon as the platforms were ready, we started raising awareness, finding early adopters, and refining the understanding of our users’ needs. This has helped us reach over 100 government services since 2015.

We’ve learned that if we can make it easy for service teams to improve and publish accessible forms, these teams will make things better for millions of people and save government a huge amount of money.

So we’re starting an alpha to explore what this might look like.

We’ll be partnering with smaller services to learn how to improve and publish accessible forms. We’ll also be talking to departments, government suppliers and the wider tech industry who are already looking at solutions to this problem. We’ll learn about the ways they’re solving this today and how we can scale up the best solutions across the whole of government.

The challenge

There are still a huge number of paper forms in government. The 5,078 PDFs and Word documents on GOV.UK alone are downloaded 36 million times each year.

Many forms have very high error rates. This results in caseworkers having to contact every person who submitted a form, to fix basic errors before the form can even be looked at. It’s clear that most of these problems come from the way the guidance is written, not the fact that the form is delivered using paper.

In general, we found poor experiences for users and high costs for government. Service teams, especially caseworkers and operations staff, want to improve things because they feel the pain of bad forms. But services with low transaction volumes can rarely justify the cost of a development team. And many larger services haven’t yet been prioritised for digital transformation.

The users of these services are being left behind.

The solution is much more than digitising forms

It’s easy to think that the solution is to make a forms builder, which allows service teams to get rid of all that costly data entry and illegible handwriting. But this doesn’t solve the most expensive problems, which come from people putting the wrong information on the form because it’s not clear to them what they’re being asked for.

We found that the main problems for users are:

forms are hard to find in the first place

poor guidance means people call for help before they start

most forms don’t work for people with access needs

users have to fill in too much unnecessary information or give the same information multiple times

more than half the forms require evidence to be attached

These are the main challenges for service teams:

eligibility is often determined too late in application processes

error rates are very high (and errors are costly to resolve)

costs of processing forms are not being measured

forms are difficult to change

caseworkers have little say in improving forms

Yes, making forms digital can open up opportunities for doing things better in the future. But it’s impossible to unlock the biggest benefits without improving the content and design first. You can’t do that with a digital tool alone.

Paper isn’t going to go away

Digitally excluded users will always need paper forms. Some services will always need wet signatures, although we do expect the number to decrease. And some forms will always need to be sent in the post along with physical evidence.

We need to find a way to provide paper forms and digital forms at the same time, or we’ll just end up doubling the number of forms available.

This will need to work at scale

If thousands of teams are going to improve and publish their forms, they’ll need the guidance and the tools to do this easily and quickly themselves.

We’ll partner with service teams and content designers across government to prototype and test which guidance and tools are most useful. We’ll find out which existing tools are fit for purpose rather than building new ones from scratch.

The opportunity

We’re starting an alpha looking at making it easy for service teams to improve and publish accessible forms alongside better guidance that helps users complete them successfully the first time.

If this works, in future it will be possible to prototype, build, test and iterate simple services without needing a development team. Just think what a content designer and a user researcher pairing could do with that.

It also potentially opens the door to thousands of currently non-digital services taking online payments, verifying identities, and using cross-government data. These things reduce the pain of supplying information that government already holds.

Some of this is a long way off. But we’re excited to get started.

Help us with our alpha

If you work in a service team using paper forms and you want to help us out with our alpha please get in touch. If you’re working on the same problem in your department we’d love to learn from your experience too.